Misc. bits

1. Pollution Prevention and OR. It was last updated over 10 years ago, but the NPPC IE/OR Resource List web page has a good collection of references. The page heading says pollution prevention, but many of the references are on other environmental topics. Some are from the OR literature (including EJOR, Operations Research, and OR/MS Today) while others are from more general sources. Likely worth following up on. Housed at the University of Michigan, the NPPC appears to have been superseded by the Center for Sustainable Systems (CSS). The CSS has an extensive website. It has an industrial ecology emphasis but also appears to be highly interdisciplinary, including connections to the OR realm. If you’ve ever gotten a Stonyfield Farm yogurt and wondered how they decided to ditch the plastic cap, apparently CSS was behind it (see image below). See their “Accomplishments” brochure (pdf) for a quick run-down of what they’ve done.

2. OR50 Program. The program for OR50 is up and may be worth scanning as it contains some sustainability talks including a few on wind power and
an OR-Sustainability debate (see this earlier post).

3. INFORMS is a “Green Publisher”
From an INFORMS email:

INFORMS is classified as a “green publisher” with Sherpa-Romeo, a source of information for publishers’ policies on self-archiving and posting papers electronically. Sherpa-Romeo classifies a publisher as “green,” indicating that the publisher permits authors to self-archive their accepted papers on their personal or institution’s website in preprint and postprint…

That’s nice. Here’s a related post about Springer open access on Michael Trick’s OR blog.

Mathematics Community Environmental Initiatives

The US Joint Math Meetings will have a number of environment-related talks, mostly on climate change. See this “State of the Planet” page for more information. For links to sites about incorporating environment into mathematics courses, go here. One of the listed sites contains a number of sustainability-related real data sets in spreadsheet form.

Lastly, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has an environmental mathematics special interest group. Its main activities seem to be around the math meetings.

Four items

1) Forbes has an interesting interview with physicist Steven Chu. He is the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel prize winner. Topics include energy, the environment, and the role of nanotechnology in these areas. His closing words:

The single most important problem science and technology has to solve is this energy issue. Getting carbon-neutral energy in a cost-effective way, it’s really scary.

2) MIT launched a “Laboratory for Sustainable Business (S-Lab)” back in February of this year. The mission is to develop business models to address global warming and its impacts. A couple of system dynamicists (Repenning, Sterman) are on board.

3) The “International Research Network on Social and Environmental Aspects in Business and Management (SEABUS)” is a global network of research institutions geared towards “the conceptual and methodological exchange on innovative research on environmental and social aspects in business and management.” They will hold a “Summer Academy” in Berlin, Germany in June, 2008. The majority of the member institutions are European, with Yale University’s Center for Business & Environment being the sole U.S. member.

4) The power authority of the U.S. territory Guam has an operations research group. An MSNBC article describes some of their work in researching alternative energy sources. The projects, many of which are in forecasting, are described in more depth on the group’s website.
Update: A more recent story.

Slight update: references, more EURO items

Expanded the summary of the paper “Application of multi-criteria decision making to sustainable energy planning—A review” and added a classic reference on the recycling of paper. See References.

Jumping back here, the 2006 EURO XXI meeting in Iceland, July 2-5, 2006 was themed “OR for Better Management of Sustainable Development”.

The EURO meetings are run by EURO (the European OR umbrella group). EURO has an environmental special interest group.

Cousins?

The System Dynamics Society has an Environmental Special Interest Group. The group has a mailing list; a quick glance at the archives revealed some interesting items including mention of relevant journals, history of environmental system dynamics work.

INFORMS ENRE Section

INFORMS has a Section on Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment. The focus seems to be about application of OR techniques to these fields. There does not seem to be a slant in the direction of sustainability, though it is likely that some digging would reveal some members doing that kind of work. It is just about OR applied to problems in these areas.

According to their site, they have “two strong and active groups: Forestry and Energy”. The site has a decent amount of information including the Section’s presentations at the recent major conferences such as INFORMS 2006. Following up on those lists, as well as looking into the research of the Section officers (also listed on the site) would reveal more.